Science and Ethics after Darwin

Darwin’s theory and its contemporary development into the so called “modern synthesis” are the most powerful and comprehensive tool of understanding the living world, human beings included. Darwinism consequences regard not only our scientific picture of the world, but they extend to the whole of human thinking. Placing human moral life into the evolutionary picture helps a naturalistic comprehension both of the genealogy of ethics and of the human moral psychology. The course will present a general picture of Darwin’s theory and will explore its fallouts for the philosophical analysis of ethics. In particular, discussion will focus on ethological research about non human proto-moral behaviors and neuroscientific evidence about human moral psychology.

The course includes the following issues:

1. Darwin and Darwinism: an overview

2. Darwin and Ethics: from Darwin to Sociobiology

3. Ethology and ethics

4. Neuroethics

5. Darwinism and normative ethics

F. De Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, Princeton U.P., Princeton (NJ), 2006

N. Levy, Neuroethics. Challenges for the 21st Century, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, 2007

Knowledge – knowledge of a naturalistic comprehension of the genealogy of ethics and of the human moral psychology and Darwin’s theory’s fallouts for the philosophical analysis of ethics.

Skills – openness towards some differing interpretations regarding the origins of ethics and moral psychology combined with the recognition of Darwin’s evolutionary theory contribution in that field.

Competence - the ability to perceive and adequately interpret various approaches to the issue of genealogy of ethics and psychology of morality and to comprehend especially the “modern synthesis” approach.